Page 35 of 2 Sisters Murder Investigations

“The electrician came today, fixed everything. He said I was lucky that I’d called him — not sure how he meant it,” Arthur said. He nodded at Baby’s phone on the edge of the table and asked, “Any nibbles?”

Baby picked up her phone and opened the app that let her check on the four cameras she’d installed at Arthur’s house. They were all blacked out. She smiled.

“Not just a nibble,” she said. “Got ’em hook, line, and sinker.”

She stood, went around the table, and slid into the booth next to the old man so she could show him the phone. Baby wasn’t oblivious to the stares of other diners — the tall Black teenage girl and the elderly white dude were a combination as perplexing to onlookers as the concept of PayPal was to Arthur. She ignored the looks and rolled the video back until she had the footage she wanted:

Baby and Arthur leaving, locking the door behind them, and walking arm in arm down the porch steps. The evening breeze made the long grass at the front of the property shiver. Not long after, a figure in a hoodie approached from the end of the street, walking swiftly, head down.

Baby and Arthur watched the figure on the video march quickly up the porch steps, hop up onto the rail, and pull a can of spray paint from his pocket. The image darkened. They watched more footage of the guy in the hoodie traversing the porch, again hopping the rail, and jogging down the side of the house to hit camera number two.

“See how he jumped down from the rail like that?” Arthur sipped his whiskey. “I used to be able to do that.”

They watched as the hoodie guy blacked out all four cameras. Baby noted the time stamp. “Eight oh seven p.m.,” she said. About an hour and a half ago.

She opened a second app on her phone, the one for the hidden cameras, and scrolled the tape to 8:07 p.m. Just as Baby had expected, as soon as the man in the hoodie finished blacking out the fourth and final decoy camera, he raked back his hood, giving the hidden camera a full view.

She snapped a screenshot of his lean, bearded face.

“Gotcha.” She smiled.

“So now what do we do?” Arthur asked.

“We take our orders to go,” Baby said. “You’re gonna want something to nosh on in the car. We’re going for a world record in intergenerational learning here tonight, Arthur. My job is to explain facial-recognition software to you. Your job is not to have a stroke while you’re trying to grasp it.”

“You saw what kind of trouble I got into trying to use the microwave, right?” Arthur sighed.

“I believe in you, man.”

“Can’t I do my learning here? I’m comfy.”

“No,” Baby said. “We’ve got one more stop tonight.”

CHAPTER38

THE ANIMAL SHELTER WASa sprawling place, a low brick compound ringed by trees and hidden from the lights of nearby Koreatown, a dark pocket in a glowing city. Baby could hear barking from where she stood at the roadside brushing down the front of her pencil skirt and adjusting the collar of her crisp white button-down shirt in the side mirror of the station wagon. Arthur watched her from the front passenger seat, one elbow slung over the windowsill, his cheeks flushed in the warm night.

She hit the buzzer on the intercom, shook tingles of nervousness out of her fingertips.

“Yeah?”

“We’re here for the pickup,” Baby said. There was a pause. She glanced at the cameras over the cyclone fence. The intercom crackled.

“Sorry, what pickup?”

Baby flashed a badge at the camera over the fence like she didn’t know there was a more accurate camera on the intercom panel. “Got approved this afternoon. It’s on the schedule.”

“What schedule?” Arthur asked. Baby shushed him and waved at the car. She waited, her breath a hard ball caught in her throat. The cyclone fence buzzed and slid back.

“Don’t blow it, Arthur,” she warned him as she got back in the driver’s seat.

“I might be the only guy in LA who’s never taken an acting class,” he said. “Wasn’t a problem until now.”

“So keep your mouth shut and we’ll be fine.” She slapped his chest lightly. When he didn’t smile, she slapped his chest a little harder. She heard her father’s words come from her own lips, as if Earl were riding along with them: “Come on. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

The monster dog dragged itself to its feet when Baby and Arthur appeared before its cage, lumbering to its full height one heavy limb at a time like a wounded elephant rallying. The animal was a saggy, probably drugged, and definitely demoralized version of the one Baby had seen in the thieves’ den earlier this week, but the dog stirred something in her. She had been terrified the first time. Now she was curious. Arthur’s eyes nearly bugged out of his skull until Baby knocked his shoe with her own, reminding him to keep cool. The shelter’s night attendant scoured the heavy, tattered logbook lying open on his desk in the concrete hall full of cages.

“I got nothin’ in here about a pickup,” he said. “Certainly nothing about a visit from any cops. Makes me nervous, letting a dog go without the proper outtake forms and all.”

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